It's no secret the video game industry is trending towards digital, with an increasing percentage of console game sales coming from downloads each year.

But for EA, that trend is moving faster than it predicted.

In a financial call last night, EA predicted the industry will end 2017 probably above 40 per cent for full-game downloads. If correct, it means we're hurtling towards that magical 50 per cent milestone.

It's fair to say that most people who read this will have at least an idea of what an eSport is. Whether you're actively tuning in to watch competitions, will take a look at an eSport event if it comes on or are actively uninterested in it all, you're likely to know the basics of what an eSport is and that the industry is hyped about its prospects.

Craig "Nepenthez" Douglas, the British YouTuber who must pay £91k of fines and costs after pleading guilty to gambling offences, has spoken out about the verdict for the first time - and the last, he says.

DICE's Frostbite engine now powers a great majority of Electronic Arts' internally developed game - a state-of-the-art piece of technology that has strongly delivered cutting-edge experiences on key franchises including Battlefield, FIFA, Need for Speed and the upcoming Mass Effect. With some of the sharpest rendering engineers in the business working on the technology, we expected big improvements bearing in mind Pro's big GPU boost. By and large, we haven't been left down.

We'll begin with the 'easy one'. FIFA 17's PlayStation 4 Pro upgrade is impressive - not especially so in terms of visual features, but certainly for its prodigious increase to base resolution. The 1080p framebuffer from the standard PlayStation 4 version gets an uncompromised lift to native 4K - no upscaling, no checkerboarding, no temporal super-sampling. The end result is that an already clean and crisp title receives an even great boost to visual clarity.

However, FIFA's ineffectual anti-aliasing solution remains in effect at 4K. Edge and specular shimmer at 1080p is reduced owing to the higher pixel density, but it's still visible owing to the high contrast aesthetic. We did most of our testing on a 40-inch Samsung KU6400, which possesses a remarkably high pixel density, but the aliasing is still plain to see - it'll even show up in the video below. 1080p users at least get this image down-sampled, so it's less of an issue, but Frostbite's excellent temporal anti-aliasing would have helped here.

Pause abuse. Celebration abuse. Replay abuse. Kick off abuse. Parking the bloody bus and passing around at the back for 80 minutes. FIFA players have for years trolled their online opponents by dragging out matches once they've taken the lead.

In real-life there are plenty of injury prone players knocking about. You know the type: they play a few games, get injured, spend a few weeks on the sidelines, come back, then get injured again. Think Jack Wilshere, Andy Carroll and all Arsenal players ever.

Each year EA sparks a heated debate over the player ratings in the latest FIFA game. For FIFA 17, for example, EA replaced Lionel Messi with Cristiano Ronaldo as the game's top-rated player, which upset some and pleased others.

It's been 23 years since FIFA International Soccer, the first FIFA game, was released. For more than two decades, EA has taken its most successful product, tweaked it slightly, added a few marketing phrases and released new annual editions to huge success. Often it's little more than the rosters that can objectively be said to have 'improved'. But still we, as a gaming public, lap it up. If EA had gotten a little complacent, you could hardly blame them.

Complacent, however, is not a word you could use to describe FIFA 17. Boasting both brand new tech and a major new game mode, it feels like much a bigger step, apart from between consoles, than we're used to taking in a mere 12 months. Whether this comes about from a feeling of increased threat from its candy-dispensing rivals, or some residual guilt towards its loyal fanbase, it's hard to say. What we can be unequivocal about is EA's ambition - to create a landmark release in the series. How successful it's been in achieving that is harder to say.

Let's start with Frostbite, EA's much-trumpeted game engine - one that, it's claimed, will take players "to new football worlds" (the worlds of Battlefield and Mass Effect, presumably). Taking front and centre stage in much of the game's advertising messaging, it's clear EA hope this will be a platform for the franchise to build on for at least the next four to five years. It's a shame, then, that playing in this bold "new world" feels so disappointingly familiar.

Digital Foundry plays FIFA 16 and 17 simultaneously - with the same controller.

FIFA 17 moves to the Frostbite engine this year, the same tech as seen in Battlefield One and the upcoming Mass Effect. It's a departure from the Ignite engine used between FIFA 14 and 16 - introduced to show off the capabilities of PlayStation 4 and Xbox One - and allows for a big improvement in the series' lighting and atmospheric effects. We pit the two engines against each other here to see exact extent of the change, and if this is the series visual overhaul we've been waiting for.

I'll be honest, I didn't expect much from FIFA 17's story mode. But now I've had a go at the short slice of The Journey that's available with the recently-released demo, I'm fully on-board with this wonderful curio.

Ask anyone at this year's gamescom and they will probably agree - this year's show feels a little different. There have been a couple of new announcements, sure, but much of the offering here in Cologne feels a little familiar, a tad reheated.

E3 week is always a hectic affair. Typically speaking nobody has had enough sleep, everyone's had far too much caffeine and there's never not a huge stack of things on which to report. Small wonder, then, that it often takes for the show itself to close before we get the chance to reflect and realise just how weird E3 actually is.

EA has shown off FIFA 17's new story mode, dubbed The Journey, in a dramatic trailer.

The new mode lets you lace up the boots of the Premier League's newest, most promising star - a man named Alex Hunter - as he prepares to make his first league appearance. Who he plays for is up to you; whichever club you pick though, it seems like you're in for a dramatic tale of ambition, politics and, presumably, football.

We'll have more on this mode very soon - in the meantime, check out the trailer and let us know what you think in the comments.